Collaborative email: Why you should use it now

One of the most efficient and versatile current means of communication is email. Not just for personal use, the impact email has had on the way businesses are held now, is truly impressive. You may hear a lot about the “death of email” but that it’s far from the truth.

In fact, as a marketing tool, is one of the strongest weapons available for companies around the globe. However, when not handled and organized properly it leads to a lack of productivity issues and other problems.

New elements, like Collaborative Email, are responsible to remove those inconveniences. As a result, email works for its users, not the other way around.

But, what is a Collaborative Email, anyway? 

In a nutshell, Collaborative Email is an inbox to which several people have access to. Work team members can access this collaborative email and work from it. This is a much more pragmatic approach than having big teams working from their personal email accounts.

Usually what companies do is that they give the login credentials to the entire team. It is something that Sales, Info, and Support teams implement before they experience multiple issues regarding email organization, time-efficiency, lack of productivity, and mainly not knowing who’s working on what.

Collaborative email helps teams with easy inbox access for everyone. Nobody will ever lose track of their progress or will be stressed out over a cluttered inbox or an endless email thread. Collaborative inbox gives everyone the right amount of control and power to enhance productivity and efficiency as a team.

Another great aspect of Collaborative Email is that it helps reduce easy-to-make mistakes that can be costly for the company. These errors include email clients in error or having team members emailing clients at the same time over the same issue. This reduces the trustworthy perception of your brand. It could also happen that no response is sent at all, which is even worse than sending wrong or repetitive information.

Collaborative inboxes allow users to access the same interface simultaneously. With the right collaborative email, you can easily assign, delegate, send notes in an email, and many more features. Join us to disclose its benefits to show you when is a good idea to have Collaborative Email.

A work team playing more than one role 

If you have a small company it is possible that some team members are performing more than one role for the company. At this point, team members are probably sharing some of their work, like responding to customer inquiries. What are your strategies to answer questions from clients, users, sponsors? Ideally, at this point, all staff members should be capable of answering any business-related question.

Using collaborative email will help you or any other admin to see all customer interactions and rapidly determine who´s more suited for the task. A collaborative email helps team members to have better, faster communication channels to address problems and improvement areas. Nothing is going to be left unattended or unanswered. 

Companies handling more than one inbox

If your company uses multiple inboxes for different sections within the company, like sales, info, or support, you may want to start considering using collaborative email. The first reason to do it is to address possible security issues. Imagine the sales department of a company. In the regular email world, they have no other option but to share email credentials with the rest of the team. This increases the chances of outsiders having access to such sensitive information. This is not just for sales, all the other company divisions should safe-keep all of their data.

This leads to another issue. Using a regular inbox as a collaborative one – when everybody is sharing the email password –  doesn’t mean they are all allowed to work the inbox at the same time. There’s still a limitation on the number of people who can access the inbox. That scenario isn’t practical at all.

In addition to these types of scenarios, think about other instances that will become an issue if you don’t have a collaborative email.  How are people logging in to that inbox? Who has admin privileges and what happens if they’re not around? It’s a lot of guesswork for a company that should be focusing on addressing their business issues, not inbox issues.

Collaborative email gives everyone in the team access, using their own login credentials. Whoever is on the team, can access the shared inbox at will and at the same time. You and other admins can keep track of who’s working on what, seamlessly. 

If you have a big staff, or if your current one is growing rapidly 

Small businesses can grow. One-man companies may require additional staff. It all comes down to their growth plans and to how good they’re doing in the market. It’s great to see small companies developing and expanding, and kudos to you if you’re actually considering growing as a brand. Despite that, both big and small companies need to be aware of the downside of growth. If you’re not prepared for it, you may find you and your staff dealing with big levels of miscommunication. 

Think about customer support issues for example. A dissatisfied customer is sending emails regarding an issue that’s particularly difficult to handle. It may be a situation where ten heads are better than one, so you decide to share it. Before you know it, there’s an endless thread of email forwards and CC’s that will tangle everything. 

Wrapping up

Remember you can make the most out of your inbox by implementing a shared inbox. The best part is that you can implement these business tools without having to install expensive software. Sometimes the best solutions are just one Google Chrome extension away. Regain control of the real purpose of the email, which is to be a real business tool for you.

Drag turns Gmail into your Team’s Workspace – One single place to support customers, manage tasks and close deals, from the place teams love: Gmail. We are a Techstars-backed Company, trusted by 30,000 users around the World.